Rage Against the MLB.TV: Paying for Error Messages

MLB.TV sells their premium package with a feature called MOSAIC, one that allows a user to watch up to six games simultaneously. 

See the MLB.TV homepage for a picture of their MOSAIC service, as I am not authorized to copy this photo to this web site.

In my case, the feature worked OK during the daytime. However, for night games, when Internet traffic balloons, the feature chokes, with a constant error message of stream error retying, in all the little screens.

Sure the premium package delivers single games in streams of up to 1.2 mbps, giving the user the ability to watch one game at a time and "channel surf" to the next game to see if it's interesting.

However, this isn't what I paid for. I want to watch six teams, mostly American League, at the same time in the evening, as they promise.

So I spent many hours in Bangalore, getting nowhere, with my cable provider determining if the problem was with the cable provider or with MLB. Similarly, I spent time documenting this problem to MLB, with data I captured.

I spent six to eight hours analyzing the issue using an IP trace route (egg head stuff) and determined that the packets take too long to get to me.

It was not the fault of the cable provider (Time Warner 6 mbps), but rather at the MLB end, the AKAMAI (Yahoo) servers and the first four "hops"  (out of 16 hops total) to get to my wireless router which is the end point.

The first four "hops" buried these packets for far too many milliseconds. The bottleneck, simply stated, is that MLB.TV failed to live up to its contractual obligations and could not deliver MLB.TV during the first month of the MLB season.

I also became wary after installing the MLB.TV "nextdef and autobahn" plug-in. I determined that these plug-ins loaded 40 megabytes of their program at start-up, and thus not only took away 40 meg of precious RAM, but also CPU cycles.

This was true whether or not I used MLB.TV. Note that these plug-in(s) are required to run the premium package.

So I called their customer support line, asked for a refund for the month of April, and cancelled my subscription. Here is their response:

"05/13/08
Dear Valued Subscriber:
Your request for a refund in connection with your 2008 MLB.TV Premium Monthly Subscription subscription has been denied in accordance with the terms of your purchase. Should you wish to discuss your subscription further, please contact Customer Support toll-free at 1-866-800-1275.


Sincerely,

MLB.com"

Until May 31, 2008  there is an MLB.TV promo—pay for one month of premium service with your MasterCard and receive a free month. After viewing the rage against MLB on their blog site, and presumably many cancellations (all 162 team home games are blacked out in your area), MLB decided to cut the price in half for two months.

I haven't signed up yet, as I'm too embroiled in the home team's ups-and-downs (the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim) to really give a hoot about MLB.TV or giving them another nickle of the little money I have.

Should I get an upgrade to my one gigabyte of RAM and go to two gigabytes of RAM for my two-year-old computer? And then spend $50 for the upgrade and allow the plug-in access to 40 megabytes of that RAM?

I'm not that retarded. When visiting outlet.dell.com, I find brand new desktops for $199 and up.

So good riddance to MLB.TV, their blackouts and their shoddy delivery of promised services.

I'll continue to watch movies and TV for free from HULU.COM and the networks.